“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For many centuries (pause) the structure of the Roman Catholic church held [Western] civilization together, and gave it its meanings and its precepts. Those meanings and precepts flowed through the entire society, and served as the basis for all of the established modes of knowledge, commerce, medicine, science, and so forth.

(Long pause at 9:25.) Some other civilizations have believed that illness was sent by demons or evil spirits, and that the world was full of good and bad spirits, invisible, intermixed with the elements of nature itself, and that man had to walk a careful line lest he upset the more dangerous or mischievous of those entities. In man’s history there have been all kinds of incantations, meant to mollify the evil spirits that man believed were real in fact and in religious truth.

(Pause at 9:50.) There are obviously some conditions that in your terms are inherited, showing themselves almost instantly after birth, but these are of a very limited number in proportion to those diseases you believe are hereditary—many cancers, heart problems, arthritic or rheumatoid disorders. And in many cases of inherited difficulties, changes could be effected for the better, through the utilization of other mental methods that we will certainly get to someday.

(Pause at 10:05. Jane had delivered all of the above material for Seth with an emphatic mixture of speed, irony, and amusement.)

In that framework, even the emotions of love and exaltation are seen as no more than the erratic activity of neurons firing (pause), or of chemicals reacting to chemicals. Those beliefs alone bring on suffering. All of science, in your time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s heart. Science has, you have noted, denied emotional truth. It is not simply that science denies the validity of emotional experience, but that it has believed so firmly that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observing the exterior of nature.